Blaine Phibbs got his first look at Ashley Smith the day she came off the plane that brought her to Kitchener, Ontario, and the Grand Valley Institution for Women, a federal prison.
The teenager was being escorted to the segregation unit, and Phibbs, who worked at GVI as a correctional officer (delicately called a “primary worker” in the women’s system) remembers opening a gate for Ashley and her escorts.
“My first impression of her was she appeared sedated,” he said Tuesday, where he is testifying at the coroner’s inquest now examining Ashley’s death.
Where sometimes escorts are a pro forma sort of thing, Ashley, he said, actually “needed someone to hold her up.”
He wasn’t asked what he felt, but he was a do-good-y sort of fellow who previously had worked for children’s aid societies and youth homes — in fact, he was drawn to the job ad by the description of “primary worker” because “it didn’t sound like a correctional officer” — and he might have had a twinge of empathy for the 19-year-old who was walking so slowly.
If so, Phibbs was due for a short, sharp lesson in the complicated reality of Ashley Smith.
On her first full day at the institution, Ashley smashed the sprinkler head in her cell and flooded it.
It was the first time Phibbs, then almost two years into what became an abbreviated correctional career, had ever seen anyone do that. The noise of the rushing water, not to mention the smell, were overwhelming, he said.
Also within her first 24 hours, “within probably 12 hours,” he said, “she had something around her neck.”
This was the 19-year-old “tying up,” as it was called.
Out of sheets, towels, whatever she could get her hands on, she was considered “resourceful” by institutions where she had previously been an inmate. Ashley would fashion homemade ligatures, secret them in her body cavities and use as required — tie the strips around her neck. On a bad day, Phibbs said, she would tie up “at least seven or eight times, in my 12-hour shift.” On a good day, there would be no tying up incidents, but there were “waaaay more bad days,” he told the five-member jury.
The good days would come when, and here Phibbs apologized for being crude, “she ran out of stuff in her vagina” and “her behaviour got more positive.” With no more ligatures available, he said, it was as though Ashley would shrug and say, “OK, let’s do something.”
Guards like Phibbs weren’t allowed to conduct a body-cavity search of an inmate and even if a warden would agree to having one done at a hospital, Ashley herself had to consent. The only option was to “form her,” that is have her declared unable to provide informed consent under the provincial Mental Health Act and have the procedure done involuntarily.
If the staff at GVI weren’t told what was meant by “resourceful” ­— in fact, they formally were given virtually no background about her, Phibbs said, before she arrived — they soon learned for themselves.
One day, in one of those SNAFU mistakes, he asked that a cell in another part of the jail that was being used as a temporary segregation cell, be opened.
But someone pushed the wrong button, and Ashley’s cell was inadvertently opened.
She went back in of her own accord when she spotted staff coming toward her, Phibbs said, but by then she’d managed to snatch a sheet out of the range dryer, and the rubber band from around the dryer seal. One silly mistake, and Ashley now had a fresh supply of ligatures at hand.
That was June 7, 2007, on her first almost month-long stay at GVI.
It occasioned a two-hour watch over her, with one guard stationed outside her cell door, peering in through the window, and another running the video camera that is mandatory in such incidents.
Jurors watched only about 15 minutes of the video, but will view the rest Wednesday.
Phibbs was one of the guards on duty on Oct. 19 that same year, during Ashley’s second stay at Grand Valley.
She died early that morning of ligature asphyxiation.
Phibbs is seen on the video that captured her death, performing mouth-to-mouth in vain after he and other guards — apparently frozen in place by recent orders that they not go into her cell unless she actually had stopped breathing — belatedly entered the cell to cut off the ligature around Ashley’s neck.
Phibbs is expected to remain in the witness stand the rest of the week.

Christie Blatchford was born in Quebec and studied journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has written for all four Toronto-based newspapers. She has won a National Newspaper Award for column... read more writing and in 2008 won the Governor-General’s Literary Award in non-fiction for her book Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army.View author's profile